Ride the Lightning

Government Threatened Yahoo to Force Compliance with NSA's PRISM

September 22, 2014

Though I was not surprised, I was dismayed to read the Washington Post story of how newly unsealed court documents revealed that the government threatened Yahoo with $250,000 daily fines if it didn't comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications – a request that Yahoo believed was unconstitutional.

The company lost its battle in the FISA Court of Review and became one of the first companies to give the NSA extensive access to records of online communications of users under the NSA PRISM program. We know from the 1500 pages of court documents that Microsoft was actually the first company to allow such access. Eventually, most U.S. technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied.

Until the documents were unsealed, Yahoo was legally unable to reveal its fight to resist government pressure. Many companies took a lot of heat for what seemed to be willing compliance – the privacy-loving Europeans were especially angry – but it seems there may have been more resistance than we knew.

It appears that the technology companies are hardening their stance against the government by continuing what now looks like a forced march down the path to encrypting everything in an attempt to protect user privacy. The tension between the government and the companies has become a constant in our lives – it seems to me that it is unlikely to abate.

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